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Related papers: Variational Sequential Monte Carlo

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Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have recently shown successful results for conditional sampling of generative diffusion models. In this paper we propose a new diffusion posterior SMC sampler achieving improved statistical efficiencies,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Zheng Zhao

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…

Computation · Statistics 2017-08-30 James E. Johndrow , Jonathan C. Mattingly , Sayan Mukherjee , David Dunson

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

In Bayesian inverse problems, one aims at characterizing the posterior distribution of a set of unknowns, given indirect measurements. For non-linear/non-Gaussian problems, analytic solutions are seldom available: Sequential Monte Carlo…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-26 Alessandro Viani , Adam M Johansen , Alberto Sorrentino

Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-04 Pedro Regueiro , Abel Rodríguez , Juan Sosa

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Anya Katsevich , Philippe Rigollet

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

We analyze the accuracy and sample complexity of variational Monte Carlo approaches to simulate the dynamics of many-body quantum systems classically. By systematically studying the relevant stochastic estimators, we are able to: (i) prove…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-10-11 Alessandro Sinibaldi , Clemens Giuliani , Giuseppe Carleo , Filippo Vicentini

Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-20 Chenguang Dai , Jeremy Heng , Pierre E. Jacob , Nick Whiteley

We present a sequential Monte Carlo sampler algorithm for the Bayesian analysis of generalised linear mixed models (GLMMs). These models support a variety of interesting regression-type analyses, but performing inference is often extremely…

Computation · Statistics 2008-10-08 Y. Fan , D. S. Leslie , M. P. Wand

Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yufei Cui , Wuguannan Yao , Qiao Li , Antoni B. Chan , Chun Jason Xue

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Kyurae Kim , Jisu Oh , Kaiwen Wu , Yi-An Ma , Jacob R. Gardner

Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-22 Xuezhen Li , Can M. Le

There has been an intense development on the estimation of a sparse regression coefficient vector in statistics, machine learning and related fields. In this paper, we focus on the Bayesian approach to this problem, where sparsity is…

Computation · Statistics 2016-02-25 Xichen Huang , Jin Wang , Feng Liang

Gaussian variational approximations are widely used for summarizing posterior distributions in Bayesian models, especially in high-dimensional settings. However, a drawback of such approximations is the inability to capture skewness or more…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Lucas Kock , Linda S. L. Tan , Prateek Bansal , David J. Nott

The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non- asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately intractable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-16 Pierre Alquier , James Ridgway , Nicolas Chopin

We present a variational inference (VI) framework that unifies and leverages sequential Monte-Carlo (particle filtering) with \emph{approximate} rejection sampling to construct a flexible family of variational distributions. Furthermore, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Rahul Sharma , Soumya Banerjee , Dootika Vats , Piyush Rai

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are powerful computational tools for analysis of complex statistical problems. However, their computational efficiency is highly dependent on the chosen proposal distribution, which is generally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-10-02 Isambi S. Mbalawata , Simo Särkkä , Matti Vihola , Heikki Haario

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Ilsang Ohn , Lizhen Lin

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for reward-guided diffusion models often suffer from rapid lineage collapse: a few high-reward particles dominate the population within a handful of resampling steps, destroying diversity and degrading…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Shivanshu Shekhar , Sagnik Mukherjee , Jia Yi Zhang , Tong Zhang